100 Best Submarines Books of All Time

But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention in the fleet. Marquet acted like any other captain until, one day, he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why the order wasn't challenged, the answer was "Because you told me to." Marquet realized he was leading in a culture of followers, and they were all in danger unless they fundamentally changed the way they did things. That's when Marquet took matters into his own hands and pushed for leadership at every level.

Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy's traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control. Before long, each member of Marquet's crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command.

No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader.

With that shrill cry, three Muslim terrorists blow up a key Soviet oil complex, creating a critical oil shortage that threatens the stability of the USSR.

To offer the effects of this disaster, members of the Politburo and the KGB devise a brilliant plan of diplomatic trickery - a sequence of events designed to pit the NATO allies against each other - a distraction calculated to enable the Soviets to seize all the oil in the Persian Gulf.

But as this spellbinding story of international intrigue and global politics nears its climax, the Soviets are faced with another prospect, one they hadn't planned on: a full-scale conflict in which nobody can win.

U.S.S. Seawolf: Submarine Raider of the Pacific, first published in 1946, is the story of one of the Navy's most successful submarine's operating in the Pacific during World War II. Told from the viewpoint of Chief Radioman Joseph Eckberg, The Wolf's adventures are related with a gripping realism...the heat, sweat, depth-charge attacks are all portrayed in vivid detail.

Seawolf departed Portsmouth, New Hampshire on 12 April 1940 for her shakedown cruise, which lasted until 21 June and took her as far south as the Panama Canal Zone. Seawolf was next assigned to the Pacific Fleet, home ported at San Diego. In the autumn of 1940, she proceeded to Manila Bay and operated from the Cavite Navy Yard. When war with Japan began, the submarine readied for sea and was on her first war patrol from 8–26 December 1941. Seawolf was considered one of the most successful submarines in terms of enemy ships destroyed. The book ends with the Wolf returning to San Francisco in January 1943.

For Seawolf, however, the war was not over. Under a new commander and with a new crew, the Wolf returned to the southern Pacific. Following a number of successful missions, the submarine was unfortunately believed to be destroyed by friendly fire on October 4, 1944, off Morotai. Lost were the crew of sixty-four men plus 17 Army passengers.

With the same heart-pounding narrative drive that made The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter national bestsellers, Alex Kershaw brings to life this incredible story of survival and endurance.

One of the great secrets of the Cold War, hidden for decades, is revealed at last.

We now know that the Soviets had lost track of the sub; it had become a rogue. While the Soviets searched in vain for the boat, U.S. intelligence was able to pinpoint the site of the disaster. The new Nixon administration launched a clandestine, half-billion-dollar project to recover the sunken K-129. Contrary to years of deliberately misleading reports, the recovery operation was a great success. With the recovery of the sub, it became clear that the rogue was attempting to mimic a Chinese submarine, almost certainly with the intention of provoking a war between the U.S. and China. This was a carefully planned operation that, had it succeeded, would have had devastating consequences. During the successful recovery effort, the U.S. forged new relationships with the USSR and China. Could the information gleaned from the sunken sub have been a decisive factor shaping the new policies of detente between the Americans and the Soviets, and opening China to the West? And who in the USSR could have planned such a bold and potentially catastrophic operation?

Red Star Rogue reads like something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but it is all true. Today our greatest fear is that terrorists may someday acquire a nuclear weapon and use it against us. In fact, they have already tried.

Rogue elements within the Mossad have learned that Iran has developed its first nuclear weapon and, in ten days, will detonate it-and the target is Israel. The suspected weapon complex is too far underground for conventional weapons to harm it, and the only choice is a pre-emptive nuclear strike. With limited time, this rogue group initiates a long-planned operation called the Trident Deception. They'll transmit false orders and use a U.S. nuclear submarine to launch the attack.

In this thriller from Rick Campbell, with only 8 days before the Kentucky is in launch range and with the submarine cut off from any outside communication, one senior officer, the father of one of the officers aboard the submarine, must assemble and lead a team of attack submarines to find, intercept and neutralize the Kentucky before it can unknowingly unleash a devastating nuclear attack.

No American submarine has penetrated the Inland Sea; five boats and their crews have perished in the Bungo Suido strait. Lieutenant Commander Gar Hammond—an aggressive, attacking leader with a reckless streak—is now captain of a new submarine. Hammond may be the navy's only hope to locate and stop the Japanese super-ship before it launches . . . if it even exists.

P.T. Deutermann's previous World War II adventure, Pacific Glory, won acclaim from readers and reviewers, and was honored with the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, administered by the American Library Association. In Ghosts of Bungo Suido, Deutermann presents another sweeping, action-filled WWII novel, based on a true event from the Pacific theater.

A new world war has begun. It is the year 2012, and extremists in Germany and South Africa have succeeded in staging simultaneous coups to forge the Berlin-Boer Axis, a cabal determined to take over the world. The key instrument of this war is tactical nuclear weaponry, where a single torpedo or cruise missile can destroy an entire ship or city. And while the war will be fought with high-tech weapons, it will be won or lost by the men who command them...

The subs collide, and the Russian ship sinks to the bottom, crippled. Only Seawolf knows where Severodvinsk is, but the Russian authorities are too angry to listen to the Americans, even in matters of life and death.

Mitchell and his shipmates must keep their own damaged vessel afloat, figure out a way to make the Russians listen, and keep the trapped submariners alive until they can be saved – if that is even possible.

Larry Bond uses his experience as an intelligence officer, warfare analyst, and antisubmarine technology specialist to give readers an expertly crafted techno-thriller. Like Run Silent, Run Deep and The Hunt for Red October, Cold Choices takes readers deep into the minds of submariners and the treacherous world in which they dwell.

Now, military historian Thomas Parrish tells the story of those who first dreamed of underwater ships; of the practical and ingenious inventors and engineers who created and developed the submarine; of visionary naval strategists; of famous skippers on all sides—steel-nerved men like America’s Dick O’Kane, Germany’s Reinhard Hardegen—who wielded this weapon; of the famous and infamous deeds of boats like the U-20, the Wahoo, and the nuclear-powered Nautilus and George Washington; and of the tragedies that befell boats like the American Thresher and the Russian Kursk. Parrish’s compelling narrative blends strategy, high policy, technology, heroism, and perilous adventure.

Now, for the first time, veteran Time magazine correspondent Douglas C. Waller takes you on a tension-packed, three-month patrol deep in the Atlantic Ocean and inside one of these Tridents, the U.S.S. Nebraska. Granted more access to these awesome submarines than any journalist before, Waller penetrates one of the most secretive worlds in the U.S. Military.

The Cold War may be over, but the U.S. Navy still has Tridents lurking the oceans, always ready at a moment's notice to unleash a nuclear holocaust. In chilling detail, "Big Red" reveals the top-secret procedures for starting World War II -- the secret codes, the elaborate fail-safe mechanisms, the highly classified battle tactics for nuclear combat.

This book takes you into this closed society as a witness to secret rituals and life experience where submarines, underwater for months, hope never to unleash the destructive power they command.